Tablet III: The Flood

Tablet III of the Old Babylonian poem of Atrahasis carries the flood, the climax of a story that has been building since the first tablet. The gods, having created humankind to bear the labour they refused, find that the noise of a multiplying humanity disturbs their rest; plague, drought and famine are sent in turn and each is undone by the counsel of Enki (Ea), until Enlil resolves on a deluge and binds the gods by oath to say nothing. Enki keeps the letter of his oath and breaks its spirit: he does not address the man directly but speaks to the reed wall of the hut in which Atrahasis sleeps, and the man behind the wall hears.

Told to tear down his house and build a boat, Atrahasis obeys, seals it with pitch, loads his kin, his craftsmen and living creatures, and shuts the door. The storm comes, and the text turns to the gods themselves, who cower like dogs at the wall of heaven, and to the mother goddess who cries out against the destruction of her own creation. When the waters go down Atrahasis offers sacrifice, and the starving gods gather over it. The tablet is broken in many places, and much of what is read here rests on the joining of several manuscripts.

The Atrahasis poem is known chiefly from a set of tablets copied by the scribe Ku-Aya in the reign of Ammi-saduqa of Babylon, in the seventeenth century BCE, with further Middle Babylonian, Assyrian and Late Babylonian recensions showing that the text was still being copied more than a thousand years later. The standard critical edition, by W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, gathered and joined those manuscripts and made the connected narrative available. What distinguishes Atrahasis is that its flood is not a free-standing wonder but the last term in an argument: the poem asks why humankind exists, why it dies, and why its numbers are limited, and answers with a myth of divine labour, human noise, and a settlement in which the gods accept humanity on condition of mortality and a curbed birth rate.

The flood in Gilgamesh Tablet XI is drawn from this tradition rather than the reverse, a point set out in Andrew George's critical edition of the Gilgamesh epic; behind both stands an older Sumerian account whose survivor is Ziusudra. Reading the flood section apart from the rest of the poem loses precisely the argument that gave it its point.

Set beside Gilgamesh Tablet XI, this tablet shows the same episode serving a different purpose. In Atrahasis the flood settles a quarrel about population and the ordering of the world; in Gilgamesh the story is told by the survivor Uta-napishti to prove that the immortality he received was a unique and unrepeatable gift, and the pattern of details, the warning through the reed wall, the boat, the storm, the sacrifice, is carried across largely intact.

The Genesis flood of chapters 6 to 9 shares that pattern in turn: a divine decision to destroy, one man warned, a great vessel, the saving of family and living creatures, a grounding, and a sacrifice on emerging. Historical-critical scholarship generally reads these as members of a common ancient Near Eastern flood tradition rather than as one text copying another, with each community shaping the inherited story to its own theology. Genesis makes the cause moral rather than a matter of noise, gives the deity a covenant to seal, and reduces the pantheon to one. Readers who hold Genesis to be revealed scripture and scholars who read it as literature can both make use of the comparison; it is offered here as comparative scholarship, which is what it is, and not as a verdict on the standing of any of the three texts.